#SDMItag

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

having a lot of thoughts as usual about sdmi and its portrayal of the cycle of abuse, and how pericles, cassidy, and ricky's foils and parallels to each other there are all both fascinating and deeply tragic.

in particular today i'm thinking about how ricky is an abusive mentor toward marcie, and tries to be abusive toward velma and fails because she has a support system and hasn't been worn down yet, and velma being an example and continuing to extend marcie support and a hand out of her situation is what gives marcie the courage to leave even when it's dangerous to do so, and how pericles spends the series--present day and past--systematically isolating ricky and dismantling his support system one by one, and how everything cassidy stood for was refusing to continue the cycle with everything she had, and how she felt so so guilty and violated and betrayed when ricky manipulated her into it anyway, and how she was willing to die to make it right, and how marcie standing up to him to great effect with her new support system leaves him utterly stunned, and how after that he starts trying to stand up for himself against his abusive mentor and break the cycle, and how he tries to take up cassidy's convictions as his weapon to do it with because cassidy was crushed under the wheels of the cycle but marcie proved it was possible to break,

and how he couldn't do that with his own abuser because pericles has spent his life building a steel cage around him, and tightening and tightening and tightening it without him even realizing it until it was too late, and how fucking devastated he is when it's finally demonstrated him that the door to the cage is closed for good,

and how when he is made complicit in his abuser reaching through the generations to make sure cassidy died for nothing, and that this little girl who gave him hope by defeating his attempt to continue the cycle couldn't escape him after all, it breaks him.

fucking kill me, man. god.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

uwus your war criminal

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

imagine.

babey pericles.

nugget.

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

oh my GOD YES. i noticed this a little while back and it fucks me up so so much, the entity has been beating him with the Curse That Drives You Insane and Destroys Your Sense of Self bat since he was a baby and it is absolutely heartbreaking, god

newniverse pericles freaks me right out, because the three options here as i see them are:

as mentioned, was always Evil regardless in the newniverse, and is pulling a wolf-in-sheep's clothing that we don't see offscreen. personally i think it's really unlikely that they intended this one, especially with the whole theme of him being Uppity because he's Crazy and Evil(tm), and the way that all the other corrupted mascots are portrayed as similar cases (just less long-term, extreme, and fueled by horrific trauma aka the asylum). it definitely makes for interesting fanfic, though. 👀

one of the two more likely options: he's literally a fundamentally different person. pericles as we know him has been completely erased from existence, because he was ontologically evil from the moment he was born and never could have been anything else, and a better world would have never had him in it at all. the best case scenario is someone else wearing his face.

(this one upsets me on several levels, ranging from visceral horror in general, to having Staunch Beliefs against that kind of thing, to it being some really nasty eugenics dressed up in positivity. because if that was their intent, then the thing that made him ontologically evil was... having either the mundane or fantasy version of congenital ASPD. YIKES.)

the other likely option: he is fundamentally the same person at the very heart of it. ...the thing is, whoever he is at the heart of it is someone who holds on so strongly to his sense of self--his sense of the way i am being treated by the world is wrong and i am going to Fucking Do Something About It--in the face of the entire world and every single person around him saying otherwise, that he was probably the most devastating weapon the nibiru entity ever had. whatever happened to him to turn him into what we see in the newniverse would have had to break him utterly, and keep breaking him for his entire life, to force him into that shape, and just... jesus.

(this is the one i go with when i'm writing newniverse pericles who isn't heavily AU'd, for a number of reasons including that he sounds incredibly strained and hysterically cheerful when we see him. like that sounds like someone desperately white-knuckling a performance that is Not Natural for them and god. the writers probably didn't intend that part, but that's because if the first half was their intent they didn't think far enough ahead to follow it to its logical conclusion. and also they're racist as hell and think 'person is totally happy with being a piece of property after their Crazy Uppity Don't Want to Be Owned Syndrome is cured' is a happy ending for everyone involved l m a o)

i've been salty about this for a decade and counting and i am always glad to have a chance to rant about it ashdjdkdjg, the Pericles is Tragic as Hell and Got Done Dirty Defense Squad train is long overdue and i am SO delighted to finally see other people point this stuff out too

(also: [BANGS FORK AND KNIFE ON TABLE] TELL OF FIC)

Professor Pericles isn’t in the Sitting Room.

Just a liiiittle something I noticed that I would like to point out and discuss.

His “better half” wasn’t shown to be trapped there with the others. So did he never separate from his? Or did he never have one at all?

Makes you wonder just how affected Professor Pericles was by the curse, because also consider:

He recounts hearing the “soothing” screams of Krampus’ victims as a hatchling in his homeland of Germany. (The gif above is him talking about it) Which would have been before he had ever set a talon in Crystal Cove. Soooo…

Was he really corrupted by the curse like everyone else? Or was he a manipulative red flag waving psychopath at birth? And if that’s the case, then what does that say about the reset timeline? Is he reeeeally as innocent as he appears as Creationex Corp’s mascot? Or is he still a wolf in sheep’s clothing?

Just saying. This makes for EXCELLENT fanfic material. 👀

(Also PLEASE comment and reblog with your own thoughts! I want to talk about this because it gave me an idea for another fic!)

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

pericles is the opposite of ricky's emotional support animal. emotional attack animal

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

one thing i love about ricky is that a good chunk of the time he's all awkward angles, and another (often overlapping) chunk of the time he's Delightful Rickyface, and then every now and then out of the blue you just get flashbanged by how hot he is

god damn

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

been doing some speedy practice sketches lately to get various characters down a bit better, have a scribble of ricky at thirteen or so that turned out alright. he's babey your honor protect him

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

can confirm. can confirm. he's the Worst and these are just layered over each other in my head constantly as i think about this show

@angorwhosebabyisthis introduced me to SDMI and therefore to professor pericles and i am making this post to say for the record that my feelings about him are the perfect storm of the jurgen leitner rant and the sneasler rant mashed up together

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: drugging, SA and SA apologia, fantasy racism/ableism, forced institutionalization.]

-

i know i never shut up about it but god i am still just. So Salty about how the show handles the dynamic between mayor jones and pericles for many reasons, and one of the biggest is that there are really strong overtones here of sexual assault.

a character who already brings to mind the Slimy, Shady Cis White Guy with Buried Allegations archetype:

takes advantage of the trust of someone who's doing something with him in secret--

(which will get that person in a disproportionate amount of trouble compared to him, if they're discovered)

--to catch him off guard so he can grab him, drug him, and do violent things to his body while he's unconscious; scars him for life in a way that is disabling and should cause a lot of ongoing suffering, which, like many other things that should have a strong negative impact on him physically or psychologically, the writers ignore; and dumps him there alone to discover what's been done to him when he wakes up.

specifically, he does this to someone from a marginalized group that's highly unlikely to be believed if they tell anyone what he did--and going by the fact that mayor jones never got in any trouble until present day, he wasn't.

goes out of the way to ruin the life of the victim and discredit him as thoroughly as possible, because he's a loose end and he needs to shut him up.

flees the scene and gets away scot free with this for twenty years, has a successful privileged career and is considered a pillar of the community in the meantime.

when his dirty secret, which he's been paranoid about finally facing consequences for after the victim has recently become a risk again, is discovered, it's a huge career-ending scandal.

is redeemed by the end, while his victim goes on to be the Monstrous Irredeemable Pure Evil Main Villain and also sexually abuse someone himself, which is played as horrific and traumatizing (as it should be).

more specifically, is portrayed as showing redeeming, heroic anti-villain qualities by backhanding the victim into a wall as hard as he can in present day.

me: hm. yeah fuck this

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

talking about sdmi meta out of context is wild because it's just 'sir blorbo bingus betrayed spoingo gungle and left them with internalized self-loathing and survivor's guilt, and then manipulated their old flame into being complicit in their murder to silence them. sir bingus did this in search of a cursed artifact to free the ancient evil god they serve and become its vessel, which their species is implied to have been created for. also this is scooby-doo and sir bingus is a talking parrot'

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

for the title of Worst Gryphon i submit to you: pericles. african grey and black-footed cat. how to make god abandon a timeline out of pure fear

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

i don't know why out of all the gags in sdmi i lose it over this one probably the most, but oh my god

something about the combination of how quick and understated it is, the extremely dark and tragic surrounding context, the scene already being really obvious innuendo, and the fact that in the midst of all this they Had to put it in for This is a Kid's Show reasons before moving on with the murder plot and the murderers' abusive relationship picking back up where it left off. and that they managed to slip a gag in without lessening the impact of that or making light of it. it's genuinely deft and it kills me every single time

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

this rewatch of sdmi has so far been a combination of skipping around and watching straight through from the beginning, and my feelings are increasingly that shaggy, daphne, and marcie are precious and oh my god someone please get these poor kids away from everyone else in this cast

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

when i say i am going to crush pericles like a pineapple in a hydraulic press i am sorry to say it's with more than one meaning

[thecottageinthedark]

#a major reason why sdmi is so incredibly haunting and compelling to me#there is both a Good End and a Bad End#and the bad end is fucking *brutal*#the nibiru timeline is a doomed timeline; and the shadow of that hangs over the new Better(tm) one#it's bittersweet and hollow and unnerving and it's supposed to be#the Good Ending isn't that that pesky doomed timeline is out of the way; and now the heroes get to settle into their cushy new lives#the Good Ending is that they have hope to pick themselves up and find their own path to happiness#in spite of what they lost to get here; and having been set adrift without it#it is not often in a kid's cartoon that you get the chance to explore a true full Bad End narrative this way and god damn#just. god it fucks me up i love this show so much#SDMItag#fave

i can't lie to you i loveee bad endings sometimes. what if nothing worked out. what if the characters gave into their worst instincts. what if they became worse. what if there's truly no hope left. what will they do out of desperation? who will they become as their worst selves?

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[three-sentence fic that went over the limit; Ricky-centric, for the prompt 'future.']

---

You've got a bright future ahead of you, said his mother to his small self, stroking his hair with tired, gentle pride. He remembers that.

These kids will have no future, bright or otherwise, thanks to him. Oh, god, he wants to say forever, I'm so sorry. But he won't get forever, and neither will they.

Five minutes, though. He picks up the sword, testing its weight in his hands. He can give them that much.